


Life in the Fast Lane

by Cards_Slash



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Domestic Fluff, First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Making Out, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-06-24 04:33:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19716289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: Aziraphale has never been very good at change.  He'd been thinking very seriously about making a few changes for a very long time, but he hadn't quite made up his mind to follow through about it.  It had nothing to do with not wanting to, just an average case of nerves.  But then, he found himself with a brand new body with a noticeable difference to the one he was used to.  That was to say, bluntly, this new body had a penis.  Specifically it had a penis that Aziraphale couldn't miracle away.And well, he was just going to have to learn to live with it.  With some help from Crowley, of course.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally meant to be a one-shot but it appears to be developing chapters. Will earn its rating, I promise.

The problem had always been that effort required _intention_ , and intention required well, _effort_. Aziraphale had always known that certain assumptions were made about his person and his preferences. He’d always been _aware_ of those assumptions (and perhaps one could say that he’d encouraged them what with all this nonsense about pronouns and honorifics: he and him and Mr. A. Z. Fell). What Aziraphale had was a chronic, lasting lack of a reason to care beyond having chosen a series of words that he preferred.

Humans had very strong feelings about these sorts of things. And it seemed that every year those feelings got a little louder, and a little stronger, and it seemed like the sort of thing that a well-meaning but uncertain angel might get wrong. Aziraphale had taken a few centuries of time to work up his courage just enough to learn to _dance_ and there wasn’t nearly as much pressure about learning to dance among humans as there was about one’s naked body and sex organs. It just wouldn’t have done anyone any good for him to have put forth the time and effort to make a penis only to horrify some poor, innocent human who hadn’t been prepared to view it.

Not that Aziraphale had really found himself overly attracted to humans. They weren’t unattractive, as a general rule, they were very similar in style to the shape that most angels chose to take. (After all, human bodies were over all much more compact and easy to manage than your average true angel form. There were a great deal less eyes, to start with, not to mention a significantly less largeness to maneuver.) The more pressing problem was that humans were _brief_. He had hardly gotten to know one before it expired from old age or infirmity. Call him old fashioned (many people did) but Aziraphale felt it was important to know something more about a person than their favorite color and their first name before you started developing a serious attachment and a desire to remove your clothes. Especially when the removal of clothes required _effort_ and _intention_.

No, humans weren’t lasting enough to make a good impression. (And the fact that heaven seemed to generally frown about angels consorting with humans, not officially, but through clues and subtle hints. Gabriel wasn’t the only one that looked at humans as some sort of stupider version of livestock that had escaped its pen. He was just the loudest.)

It wasn’t that Aziraphale hadn’t _thought_ about putting in the effort. He’d thought about sometimes. He’d thought about it an awful lot in the past eleven years or so. He’d thought about it more in the past eleven years than he had in the six thousand or so years before.

The thoughts seemed to come with absolutely no prompting; like little echoes of thought that he hadn’t had time for in the moment. They popped inside his skull like so many bubbles of soap, leaving him feeling all warm everywhere on his body. It unrolled through him, searching for any sort of place to settle and finding nothing that could be interpreted as a sexual place, floundered and fizzled to—

Well, not quite to nothing. The memory of the warmth remained, the dissatisfaction of having no method of _expressing_ the sensation lingered just under his skin. Aziraphale was left with knowing he’d had an idea about what sort of thing a man could get up to if he had the intentions. And he had inclinations toward intentions. He had inclinations toward letting his hands wander, and feel, and touch, and how that might become something more than a passing sort of curiosity. What would it be like to be naked, and touching _everywhere_?

But his inclinations, no matter how strong, had never really become intentions. (Not yet, anyway.)

But then there was _Adam_. Young Adam Young, the Anti-Christ, who had made Aziraphale a brand new body to inhabit after his had been unfortunately discorporated. Adam was an 11 year old child who had made unconscious assumptions as he made a body out of nothing. And now, Aziraphale (who had never worked up enough intention to make an effort) found himself with a fully functioning penis and absolutely no idea what one was supposed to do with it now.

Or,

Perhaps it wasn’t that he didn’t have any ideas about what one did with it. Maybe he wasn’t as imaginative as Crowley could be but that didn’t mean he was incapable of ideas. And it was well shown, these past eleven years or so, that he was perfectly capable of a lewd thought when the occasion called for it. (Wasn’t it funny how every occasion seemed to call for it the farther and farther they’d gotten into the eleven years. It had gotten to the point where an angel and a demon couldn’t even occupy the same park bench without Aziraphale having to avert his eyes for fear of developing an unsatisfying series of thoughts about how snug and yet perfectly tailored Crowley’s pants had gotten.) The problem was that for all Aziraphale had _ideas_ , all of his ideas seemed to start somewhere in the middle.

It was the starting that he couldn’t seem to figure out.

After all how did one go about indicating that they had, after many years delay and through no effort on their individual part, find themselves with the equipment to make an attempt at following through with their increasingly filthy ideas. 

Well, an angel could hardly stroll up to a demon and say something cheeky like, good job dear! Temptation accomplished, kindly remove your pants. (At least, Aziraphale didn’t think he _should_. Crowley was very fond of presenting a worldly, indifferent, uncaring sort of attitude but he could be delicate and it was just best to handle him with some care.) 

There was the option of _a date_ but all of his research into the topic had only led him to the realization that he might have been dating Crowley for the better part of a few centuries. Going out for a nice meal and a leisurely walk, discussing books and culture and the funny state of humans these days would hardly be a deviation from the norm. It just didn’t seem that he could wedge, this has been a lovely night, and if I might say, I have a penis now and I think we should give sex a go, what do you say?

This wasn’t precisely the reason that Aziraphale hadn’t put in the required effort, but the difficulty of trying to figure out how to put his new penis to use certainly made him think about just getting rid of the whole situation. Nobody knew about the change except for him, and therefore nobody could be disappointed that it was no longer there.

Except, no matter how much intention, or effort, or energy Aziraphale put into it, the penis remained. 

“Oh,” he said, long-long after it should have become obvious that it would take a higher power than his to take away what Adam had given him, “well,” and what did one say to that? What could one possibly say to accurately describe everything he was feeling at this precise moment? “ _fuck_.”

\--

Imagination was its own sort of curse when you really sat down and thought about it. Sure, it had always given Crowley what one might consider an _edge_ in certain circumstances. It might have allowed him to make a close escape in a dire situation and one might say (and should say) that imagination and a little bit of out of the box thinking is what saved the world in the end. (Who else, but an imaginative 11 year old boy would have been able to defeat Satan so quickly? Nobody.) There was plenty _good_ about imagination, but there was a downside too.

And not just the downside that left him trying to squeeze an ounce of enthusiasm out of a crowded room full of dour-faced demons who hadn’t managed an original thought in a few millennia.

No, Crowley was thinking more of the sort of downside where reality and imagination got mixed up. Sort of like that feeling when you’ve had a lovely dream about the sort of thing you liked best and it was so good, and so complete, and so believable that you almost couldn’t remember that it hadn’t actually happened. (It was best that the only person in the whole world who knew how many times Crowley had almost walked up to Aziraphale and dragged him by the shirt front into a kiss just like the one they’d had the night before _was_ Crowley. A demon couldn’t live with that sort of embarrassing honesty out in the world. It was the sort of thing that ruined your reputation. But he knew, he knew _exactly_ how many times his hand had been halfway to a familiar touch when it stopped and his brain caught up to the impulse of his body. His brain screaming something like _sorry, actually, sorry that wasn’t real. Very sorry. We made it all up._ )

His night dreams and his daydreams could win awards for pure realism.

But, reality didn’t (often) disappoint. No, reality had what all of Crowley’s dreams attempted and couldn’t ever quite manage:

Aziraphale.

Crowley couldn’t have dreamed up the scene; it was simply _too_ perfectly crafted by reality to be mistaken for the start of another one of those sorts of dreams that left him sweat-damp and dissatisfied. It had a lot in common with a frequent dream:

Aziraphale, half dressed, hair mussed, cheeks pink, lips curved around an expletive or two—and yet.

And _yet_.

Aziraphale was half dressed because he was only wearing his shirt and socks and absolutely nothing that might have been considered pants or even underpants. His hair was mussed because he had reached a point of frustration where scrubbing one’s hands through their hair seemed like the only logical thing to do. His frustration was pink-and-red splotches all over his perfect angel skin and the expletives he was forming had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with—

Well, Crowley wasn’t exactly sure what it had to do with. He wasn’t sure what was happening between Aziraphale and his pants. He couldn’t begin to imagine what the trousers had done, not with how they had been so faithfully serving their owner all these years with no indication they hadn’t done a perfectly adequate job. But Aziraphale knew. He knew _exactly_ what these pants had done to offend him, and he was offended to the highest degree. “What,” Crowley said when he thought he could manage. (He had almost removed his glasses and thought, at the last moment, perhaps he better not. Just in case.) “What have I walked in on?” Or better yet, “what have you invited me to walk in on?” 

“I didn’t invite you to walk _in_ on _anything_ ,” Aziraphale said in a very snappish tone. He crossed his arms over his chest, and set himself to the task of levelling his unassuming pants (draped over a chair) with a glower that might not have been able to intimidate a puppy. 

“You called me,” Crowley said. He did his best to say it directly to Aziraphale’s face, and he did his best to stay standing perfectly upright, because as long as he was too tall to take advantage of the present situation he didn’t have to worry about getting a proper eyeful of any of Aziraphale’s usually well-hidden skin. (Or whatever he might have manifested under the long tails of his shirt.) 

“I’m having a crisis,” Aziraphale said as if it that were perfectly obvious. As if anyone who walked in on such a scene would have the proper reaction. He flung one hand out toward the pants that were clearly the source of the crisis and raised his eyebrows to indicate that a response was required. Usually these sorts of demands were accompanied by an obvious request just barely masked as a complaint. (I’d always know the stain was there, for instance.) There was absolutely nothing in how Aziraphale looked or in anything he’d said that indicated what Crowley was meant to do.

The pants, that had always been reliable, were now the enemy. Crowley floundered, he glanced over at them (he searched in vain for a hole, or a spot, or even a crease). “It’s nothing to get so upset about, angel. Everyone,” his mouth was getting ahead of his brain again, racing toward some dumb conclusion, “outgrows,” it was worse than he’d expected, “their pants sooner or later.”

Aziraphale expectant eyebrows dropped and his flustered little mouth flatted to a straight line. His arm dropped by his side, and the pink of innocent frustration faded into a deeper rosy shade of indignation. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“If the pants don’t fit, I don’t know how they don’t fit, but if they don’t fit you don’t need me to miracle them for you—”

“If the pants don’t fit!” Aziraphale repeated. He might have been easier to look at if his aggravation didn’t make his body flutter the same way happiness made him wiggle. The flapping ends of his shirt were impossible to ignore as they danced dangerously against his thighs. The way he motioned at the pants made the bottom of his shirt leap up and Crowley found himself jerking his head up.

(A respectable demon did not, after all, ogle their best friend without permission. At least not with his clothes off.) “I don’t know,” Crowley said, “with the way you eat, I just assumed at some point—”

“The way I eat?” Aziraphale repeated. (Oh and that had been very much the wrong thing to say.)

“I didn’t mean it like _that_.”

“Exactly how did you mean it?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley had meant it exactly how it was said. He sputtered for anything that might have served as an excuse to having started the conversation at all. He grasped at the start of the predicament, searched all the way back to the phone call that had interrupted his full day of doing absolutely nothing, and then pointed at the pants. “What was I supposed to think?”

“Crowley,” was a rational interruption to the fit that Aziraphale seemed like he was going to start throwing, “I did not call you over because I’ve outgrown my pants. I called because—” And they had arrived back at the start, they’d circled straight back to the same moment Crowley had walked into. Aziraphale wasn’t embarrassed exactly but that didn’t mean he wanted to proceed either. There was a pause, and certain glossy pinkness to his cheeks, and then he charged right ahead, “Well, to be perfectly honest, I called because when Adam gave me this new body. Well,” perhaps charged wasn’t the best word, maybe ‘meandered’ would have been more accurate, “that is to say that, as we know, angels aren’t one way or another unless we want to be. I _know_ what people say about me and I know how I’ve preferred to be called all this time—but I’ve never taken the time to make it official, you know?”

“No,” Crowley said. “No, I’ve actually got no idea what you’re getting at.”

“Adam made this new body with a penis,” Aziraphale said.

There was absolutely no way Crowley could be expected to respond to that statement on short notice. He would need at least a week to formulate the response that he wanted to give, and perhaps a few extra days to work out exactly the right response that conveyed his interest as well as his sympathies but leaned very steeply toward his interests and desire for exploration of the topic. The best he could manage on a few moment’s notice was a throaty sort of noise that seemed to indicate that Aziraphale should continue explaining. 

“And,” Aziraphale looked back at the pants that had betrayed him, “I just can’t seem to get them to feel right. I don’t know what to do about the,” he made a vague downward motion to indicate his newly acquired penis. There didn’t seem to be a word to accompany the motion. 

“What do you want me to do?” (Crowley had suggestions. He had a good deal of suggestions about what he could do. None of which would improve the situation or help Aziraphale into his pants.) 

“I thought you could give me some tips,” Aziraphale said. As if this were a game of checkers, and not one half-naked angel asking a demon how to put on pants.

“One leg at a time, I think,” Crowley said. (There was his mouth going again.) He was caught on a long and desperate list of all the many things he’d like to give Aziraphale, all the glorious tips he’d amassed in the past six thousand or so years. All the ideas he’d come up with, and the dreams he’d had, and the fantasies he’d toyed with. Oh, yes, he definitely did have some pointers to share, and not a single one of them required pants.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said (with noticeable patience). “I was hoping for some advice about how,” he stuttered again, “about how exactly I should arrange the uh—the—”

“Testicles?” Crowley offered. (It was best not to call any of it anything that might not sound like a medical textbook.) 

“Well the whole configuration seems very confusing,” Aziraphale said. Like he’d only been waiting for the slightest suggestion of prompting, he pulled his shirt tails up so they could both stare down at the problem. There it was, after six thousand years of wondering, there it was Crowley and Aziraphale’s penis, finally meeting. “How do you arrange it so it’s not pinching or hanging or _bulging_?”

“Oh,” Crowley couldn’t begin to formulate a single coherent thought, “angel.” This was what hell was made of, being brought here, to this moment, with this angel, who gave no indication he had ever noticed that Crowley wanted—

What had he wanted?

Crowley wanted everything. He wanted Aziraphale’s time, and commitment, and love, and attention, and his body. He wanted everything a demon could want from anyone, and he had wanted it for a very long time. He’d gotten most of it—at least he was sure—in the odd and inconsistent ways that it could be given. Aziraphale couldn’t necessarily just come out and say he loved him, and he couldn’t move into the flat and start cluttering the place up with books but he always made space for Crowley.

Space and time.

And he didn’t say I love you, but he showed up with a flask of holy water against his better judgment.

“How the devil do you expect me to know?” Crowley said between thinking of how often he had dreamed of this moment and how disappointing it was to have happened like this.

Aziraphale dropped the shirt tails as he scoffed, “how do I—” He made another impertinent, impatient sound, “I _know_ you _know_. I don’t understand why you won’t just tell me.”

“You know that I know?” (Now that was interesting.) Crowley’s hands, which had been doing nothing precisely, hanging nowhere specifically during the whole debacle, slid themselves into his pockets at the merest suggestion that there was anything to _know_. There was a lot to think through in that statement, a lot to analyze. Aziraphale _knew_ that Crowley _knew_ how one might arrange their ‘situation’ to rest comfortably in their pants. That meant that Aziraphale _knew_ (or assumed) that Crowley had a situation to start with. That meant that Aziraphale had _looked_. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You do know,” Aziraphale said (weakly). His hand twitched at the end of his hanging arm, as if he’d thought about pointing out the obvious. (Crowley did know, and Aziraphale had gone looking for the proof, and they both knew that now.) “I don’t understand why you’re being so difficult.”

“ _I’m_ being difficult?” Crowley repeated. Oh, yes, certainly it was Crowley being difficult. It was Crowley giving everyone around him mixed signals, it was Crowley pouring his precious heart out through his eyes, looking at a demon like he’d never seen anything in the whole world as beautiful and as wanted as what he was looking at right this moment. It was _Crowley_ that had invited his best friend out for dessert that _Crowley_ ate with pornographic happiness, relishing every small bite as if he might never have another chance to feel pleasure again. It was _Crowley_ that whispered _you go too fast for me_ when they’d been playing this game for the better part of six thousand fucking years. The sun had a better chance of making out with the moon at this point than Crowley had of properly conveying his _desires_ in a way Aziraphale couldn’t possibly pretend not to have seen. “I can’t help you with this one, Aziraphale,” he said when his only options were making a run for it or screaming until his throat was raw. There was nothing sexy about a madman throwing a tantrum so retreat was his best option. “It’s all about personal preference I’m afraid. You might consider underwear, a remarkable invention modern underwear. There’s all sorts, you can try them all. I’m afraid I can’t stay.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale with far more hurt than he had any right to express given the circumstances. “Well, I understand. I’m sorry to interrupt and,” he looked around for what he wanted to say, “thank you,” didn’t seem to be right, “for your help,” and there was his Satan-damned smile trying to sparkle and failing.

\--

This had not turned out how Aziraphale had imagined at all. For starters, he hadn’t expected that Crowley would have been so peevish about offering a bit of advice. It was a _practical_ matter that needed addressing. There was nothing _personal_. He hadn’t meant to insult the demon, or to _imply_ anything untoward. Crowley had spent the whole time standing a good three or four feet away, drawn up in annoyance, hands in his pockets, still wearing those stupid glasses. His voice had been strangled in frustration, and his lips had remained twisted up in a scowl until he’d just—

Left.

He hadn’t just left; he’d left in some hurry. He’d left as if he’d suddenly remembered that he hadn’t wanted to be here to start with.

Crowley had never, despite his protestations to the opposite, ever acted as if he didn’t want to be around Aziraphale. He had always seemed perfectly content to be anywhere they could be together, no matter what they were doing. And sure he said things like: I’ll never think of you again and I’m not going to that airbase but he would have and he did. 

Maybe Crowley didn’t like being thanked, and maybe he liked to pretend that there was some evil undercurrent to rescuing Arziraphale. (There was the arrangement to think of, and perhaps that had been a justification once or twice.) They had done a fantastic job of pretending that the needed to be together every minute they possibly could to avert the apocalypse. They had spent almost eleven years having clandestine meetings and long-long dinners at nice little restaurants. They had gone for breakfast, and lunch and dinner. They’d met on busses and parks and once at the movies. They’d gotten caught in the rain and snow. They’d weathered long, hot days, pretending to be a nanny and gardener, acting like they weren’t passing notes back and forth through a gullible little boy.

Oh yes, Crowley-and-Aziraphale were champions of subtext and pretense, always doing anything at all but they were doing. But it had always been mutual; every bit as much Crowley’s fault for sputtering his defiance of being kind or thoughtful as it was Aziraphale for thinking too much of what heaven would think.

Heaven wouldn’t like this.

He couldn’t imagine that Gabriel would even consider putting effort into making genitals. He would have been outraged if he’d known that Aziraphale had done anything of the sort and even more offended if Aziraphale had ever used them! 

Of course, heaven wouldn’t have liked knowing how Aziraphale had gone back to Crowley’s flat after the apocalypse was averted, they wouldn’t have liked how the plan had been made, and how Aziraphale had worn Crowley’s skin, and how he’d wandered around Crowley’s flat. How he’d sat in his chair, and laid in his bed, and ran his hands across the glorious arched wing of his indecent-looking sculpture. Heaven wouldn’t have liked how soft Aziraphale had gotten, how easily he’d walked into hell and how much _fun_ he’d had pretending to be the demon.

No. 

Heaven wouldn’t have liked how well Aziraphale knew Crowley.

Things could just be what they were now. There were no more sides, no more assignments, no more angels and demons looking over their shoulders. No more memos, no more strongly worded reprimands. 

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said to the emptiness of the room around them. It was a rather large thought to wrap one’s head around. It was trying to imagine eternity, a feat that no amount of Crowley’s attempts to explain could properly put into words, there was no imagination vast or great enough to imagine _eternity_. And that’s what it felt like just then, the realization that Aziraphale was—

Well,

That for the very first time in all the time that he had been alive, that Aziraphale was wholly and completely free. He was singular, and capable of making choices completely separate from anyone or anything else. There was no more pretense.

There was no world to save.

There was no more good to serve.

There was no more evil to thwart.

There was only Aziraphale. If that were true, then it seemed that the opposite must also be. There was only Crowley. And if Crowley was compelled only by his own wants and Azirphale was limited only by his own willingness then there was nobody at all to blame for the sudden shock of pain twisting in his Aziraphale’s chest but themselves.

“I suppose,” Aziraphale said to himself and to his pants that were still waiting to be put on, “I’ll just need to figure out what exactly it is I want.” But he knew, he’d always known. It wasn’t a matter of wanting, it was a matter of having the guts to do something about it. There was nothing holding him back now. “Yes, well—first things,” he would just have to do the best he could do with the pants until he’d had a chance to make it to a shop. 

\--

Crowley did not _pout_ but a demon could be forgiven for taking a moody stroll through a public park. Some might say that it came down to a bit of nonsense semantics but there was an important difference between describing his present actions as pouting (that being something that small children and six thousand year old blond angels did to convey their disappointment and hopefully get someone to do something for them) and taking a moody stroll. A moody stroll could be an angry stroll.

Crowley had enough things to be angry about that he could muster up a scowl that made humans and small animals scamper out of his way as soon as they got a clear view. He had every right to be angry. He’d been on the receiving end of an unending torment of mixed signals for the better part of a few thousand years. Sure, maybe he wasn’t all that invested in Aziraphale in those first thousand years or two, but he liked to think that they had really made something out of their ‘friendship’ that deserved exploration. Every second day, he was getting invited out for breakfast and being subjected to loving smiles. Every few hours he was having flashbacks to how Aziraphale looked at him when Crowley did something he liked, and how even when he did something the angel didn’t like he always looked at him with this--

This--

Well, disappointment, but lovingly.

But Crowley went too fast, so he’d been working on being patient and being understanding. He’d been making himself content to be invited to observe and interact. There had to be a limit to the amount of torture a demon could inflict on himself. 

No. 

No, it wouldn’t be fair to be angry at Aziraphale for asking for time and space. It wouldn’t be fair to be angry to assign maliciousness to the angel’s reservations. It was every bit as much heaven’s fault as it was anyone’s. That whole lot of bastards had been filling Aziraphale’s head with insecurities since the start, they’d been demanding his perfect obedience and belittling him for _believing_ in the very notion of good. That was the trouble with the home office: they were all about the Ideals and the Great Plan and they had lost sight of the subjective nature of good and evil. Aziraphale was pure good, through and through, always trying to do his best and be what he’d been told to be. 

And sure, he made excuses, and justifications, and he thought himself in circles that allowed him to indulge in earthly pleasures but there was nothing inherently evil about enjoying yourself. 

Crowley wasn’t _angry_. 

Crowley was--

“There you are!” Interrupted the start of an admission that Crowley didn’t want to make to start with. It was a welcome interruption, the sort that blossomed all warm and reassuring in a demon’s chest (and shouldn’t, every feeling that came with the very sound of that interrupting voice was another feeling a demon shouldn’t have). Aziraphale was jogging up the walkway to catch up. If Crowley were feeling kinder he might have stopped moving, but he wasn’t in the mood. 

“Here I am,” he said.

Aziraphale was quite a sight, finally wearing the pants that betrayed him, pumping his arms as he moved, and trying and failing to jog in a way that seemed natural. In fact, halfway through catching up he gave up and just stared down at his crotch with perplexed and slightly pained aggravation. “Look,” Aziraphale said (mostly to his own crotch), “would you mind terribly if we just,” he looked around, spotted an empty bench, “sit a moment?”

“I was having a walk,” Crowley said. He did come to a stop, because even without moving it didn’t seem like Aziraphale could catch up to him at the moment.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said.

“Besides,” he hoped for a jogger or a lost mother with a pram to pass by and for the first time it seemed as if there was nobody else at the park at all. It was only him and the angel standing there with his legs just slightly too far apart to look entirely natural. “I’ve already told you that I can’t help you with your problem.”

“This isn’t about that,” Aziraphale said.

“Oh.” He looked away, out toward the rest of the path he’d intended to stalk through. There was plenty of path left, and plenty of moodiness he had left to work out. “Well, whatever it is I’m afraid that I--”

Aziraphale could move very quietly when he wanted to. (Of course, Aziraphale could almost do a great deal of things, almost an infinite amount of things, if he really _wanted_ to. Crossing five feet without making a sound was hardly a feat in comparison.) He was suddenly _there_ , so close that Crowley could smell him. So close that there was other interpretations of his motivations. 

“I don’t know what you’re playing at,” Crowley said. At least he tried to say the words, he tried to make them brave, and indifferent, and steady. But they were more like a gulp, like a prayer (if a demon could be forgiven for praying). His hand was moving on it’s own account, it was curved in the space around Aziraphale’s elbow without touching him at all. The other was hanging to the side, reminding itself that this wasn’t likely to turn out any different than it ever had. 

“Don’t you?” Aziraphale asked him, “oh dear. Maybe I’ve misunderstood.”

“Angel,” Crowley said. He would have said more, he would have asked for the torture to end, he would have brushed it off as another mistake, he would have made a joke out of it. He might have scoffed, he might have said something mean, he might have walked away and retreated back to his flat. He could have spent a week replaying this precise moment and how it had gone all wrong. Or he might have clutched the angel with both fists and asked him why they had to keep playing this stupid game, why they couldn’t celebrate their success and their freedom and--

Aziraphale’s smile was as bright as sunshine, his eyes were soft as feathery down, his hands were warm comfort, one pressed against Crowley’s chest and one curving around his neck to pull him gently down. 

_Oh_ , and it was nothing at all like how he’d always imagined it might go. There was no reckless passion, there was no drunken abandon, there was no dark corners or shadowy hollows to hide in. There was no hurry and no hurt, and no fear that it was all a terrible mistake that made his heart beat so hard it felt like it could crack his bones. 

No, the softness of Aziraphale’s lips against his was a revelation. They were out in the ruthless sunshine, as visible to every human that cared to see as they were to heaven and hell alike. They were _brazen_ and _fearless_. Aziraphale’s fingers slid into the little hairs at the base of his neck, and he made a little noise of encouragement when Crowley’s hand ran up the back of his arm. 

_Yes, good_ , the noise seemed to say. _Keep it up, very nice._

Crowley’s other hand lifted up to press against Aziraphale’s face. He shifted on his feet as his arm slid around Aziraphale’s back, he pulled the angel up against his body and he drank in the perfection of the little gasp of surprise. It vibrated straight out of Aziraphale’s throat and straight into Crowley’s body, and it was delicious and _perfect_ and--

“Would you mind,” Aziraphale asked as if one regularly interrupted kissing to ask permission, “if we used our tongues?”

Would he mind? Crowley kissed him again, and the angel hummed right along, opening his mouth with such little prompting. He tasted exactly how Crowley had always imagined, he tasted _heavenly_. They were kissing like they had no intention of stopping, swapping spit and tangling up their tongues like teenagers right out in public. Aziraphale’s hand was sliding under Crowley’s jacket, around his back to press his fingertips into the thin, sweat-damp fabric of his shirt. (Oh, and all the things he’d ever wanted were flashing through his mind like a high-speed pornographic slide show. They were all _Possible_ in that moment. They didn’t have to be daydreams and imaginative fantasies. They could all be _real_.) 

“What’s this all about?” Crowley asked before he could stop himself.

Aziraphale’s lips were pink and his breath was heavy and damp. “Oh,” he said as his grip loosened, “have I misunderstood?” He was sliding back, the way he always did when they got too close.

Crowley tightened his arm around him, held him right where he was, “no,” he said, “no you haven’t misunderstood.”

And there it was, as bright as sunshine, as bright as the stars in the sky, as bright as heaven itself: Aziraphale’s perfect smile. The wrinkles around his eyes and the brightness of his teeth and the sensation of being caught in the same halo of light. “Oh, very good.” And he kissed Crowley again, with a taste of annoyance at being interrupted. It wasn’t just that he kissed reproachfully, or that he hadn’t wanted to be interrupted, it was the way that Aziraphale said, _very good_ like he was half as fed up with the torture he’d been putting them through as Crowley was. It was pure _joy_ and _relief_. 

Nothing could have stopped Crowley from wrapping both his arms around Aziraphale and pulling him closer. And the angel’s hand slid off his chest, catching on the fabric, pulling another button loose as his arm slid under the jacket to join the first one. It was _indecent_ the way he kissed the angel. They were a few steps away from falling over in their haste to eliminate the space between them. Aziraphale was leaning up on the balls of his feet and Crowley was bending his body to close the gap, they were rubbing all along the front, a great confusing mash up of sensations—

Those horrid layers that Aziraphale just _had_ to wear. The press of metal from the dangling medal on his waistcoat, the buttons and the rolls of fabric pulled out of place by passion. The thickness of his perfectly preserved jacket that made his body beneath an undeterminable shape. And Crowley’s shirt, as thin as a sheet of paper, stretching and pulling as it was pawed at by soft-skinned and rough-touching hands. His pants were thick enough to dull the reality of the desired body pressing against his. Just thick enough to give him some modesty (not that he wanted any, he could have miracle them both to any convenient surface at a second’s notice). 

“This is a public park,” was the interruption that Crowley had expected some time ago. It was a disgruntled looking woman, frowning over the indecency of their display. “I’d expect proper conduct from someone your age,” she admonished.

Aziraphale was caught up on that ‘someone your age’ comment, and hesitating his way into an apology (by default). But Crowley fixed her with an unimpressed lift of his eyebrow, considered scaring her off and didn’t.

He didn’t, not because he didn’t want to (he did, and he would have) but because Aziraphale’s hand was pressing against his chest again, just over his heart, asking him to be steady and not rash without saying a word. The familiarity of the touch distracted him, drew all his attention down to the angel’s pale hand against his dark shirt, and he barely noticed the woman’s dismissive parting noise. 

“Well,” Aziraphale said, he cleared his throat, pulled his hands back and touched his fingertips to his lips the way he might have daintily wiped crumbs away from his mouth. “That was very nice,” his smile was _delightful_.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Crowley said.

“Do you know what would make this perfect?” 

Yes he did. But he didn’t even need to wait for Aziraphale to answer his own question to know their ideas wouldn’t be the same.

“Dessert,” Aziraphale said as breathless as he’d been when he was sticking his tongue in Crowley’s mouth. “I know the perfect place.”

Crowley could have explained his own ideas about how to really make the moment perfect, he could have invited Aziraphale over for whatever dessert adjacent items he had in his kitchen cupboards, or just outright said that sex would was even better than tongue kissing in public but— 

You had to go slow with the angel, and you had to give him time to catch up. You had to have patience, and Crowley had never been disappointed when they finally caught up to each other. He just shook his head with something like a smile tugging at his rubbed-red lips. “I’ll drive,” he said. “Anywhere you want to go.”


	2. Chapter 2

Crowley was perfectly indecent temptation. It had never escaped Aziraphale’s attention; it wasn’t as if it were a sudden, new realization. It was only worth mentioning right this moment because it hadn’t ever been quite as pressing an issue as it was lately. Crowley had _always_ been the image of desire as far as Aziraphale was concerned. He adapted to every time period, changing and yet remaining wholly unchanged, becoming more and more perfectly tempting with every incarnation.

“Door’s still closed,” Crowley said (again). He’d said it once already, like it mattered. Like it was _his_ back that was pressed up against the door, as if it was shoulders being bruised with the force of being shoved into the windows. He said it like he wasn’t the reason the door was closed to start with, as if he hadn’t grabbed Aziraphale by the wrist when he’d been set to unlock the thing, as if he hadn’t spun him around and kissed him like he couldn’t take it a single moment longer.

Crowley was sinfully perfect, sliding up against his body with a sinew-slither that did absolutely nothing to reinforce any of Aziraphale’s better intentions. His hands were thin and strong and invading, always finding their way past Aziraphale’s buttons to reduce the layers of his protection with remarkable efficiency. The last time it had been his coat, and this time it was the waistcoat, and next time it would be his shirt. And the time after his undershirt and then there would be nothing left but skin between them. Crowley’s hands were always slightly cool as they slid into the untouched places between the layers of Aziraphale’s clothes.

“Whose,” Aziraphale gasped when his lungs felt like they might burst for want of air. He tipped his head back in search of a cooling breeze and Crowley took it as an invitation to explore his as much as his neck as he could manage with the (somebody-damned) bow tie in his way. “Fault is that? Oh,” he shivered when Crowley happened across a bit of skin that seemed to have decided (all on its own) that it very much liked the wet press of a tongue against it. And the blunt edge of teeth that followed, the brush of a grin spreading in wicked delight at the discovery. 

How easy it would have been to follow the temptation that Crowley had been offering. It would take nothing more than a minor miracle to remove the obstacles to taking what he wanted. It was just a matter of figuring it out. He wanted the slow press of Crowley’s body against his, he wanted the weight and the heat of the demon holding him steadily in place. He wanted the growling, growing thing in his gut to become a fully realized monster. He wanted to wrap his hands around Crowley’s hips and—

“Oh no,” he said to his own greedy thoughts, to the startling vision of dragging Crowley in just for the sake of rubbing against him, to his stiffening penis and it’s intriguing but rude ideas, “I really must insist that we—”

“Alright, alright,” Crowley muttered against his neck. His back was bowed and his hands were reluctant as they slid out from under his clothes. He pressed a sweet, chaste kiss against this new weakness he’d found, like a promise of things he meant to come back to finish. “Your keys,” he offered. There they were, the little ring of them, hanging off his fingertip as if they hadn’t been dropped when the whole affair started. 

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said. “As I was saying, a nice cup of hot cocoa will warm us right up. It was very sudden wasn’t it? The rain?”

“The rain,” Crowley glanced over his shoulder at the roaring downpour of rain falling at a very peculiar angle (almost as if it were afraid to accidentally land too close to where the demon stood). “I’m very cold,” he agreed. The shoulders of his jacket were damp, and it was a well-known and well-established fact that both demons and snakes were happier in much warmer climates. “Not a fan of chocolate, though.”

“I have tea,” Aziraphale assured him. 

“Right,” Crowley agreed. It was the tone he used to convey that they weren’t having the same conversation but they might as well continue on pretending otherwise. Or maybe it was the tone that meant that Crowley thought he was being a little silly, and a little naïve, and he wasn’t going to ruin the moment by pointing it out. 

Either way, the bookshop was warmer than the rainy sidewalk. As soon as they were across the threshold the rain fell back into a normal pattern and dry patch they’d made with their presence was flooded entirely. “What dreadful weather,” Aziraphale said. “Follow me.”

Crowley followed, through the bookshop, and into the little living space that Aziraphale had made for himself. He glanced at the couch like he was sizing it up, and then ran his hands down the front of his shirt (the poor thing had lost another button) and seemed absolutely surprised to find Aziraphale setting two mugs on the table. “So, we _are_ drinking tea and cocoa,” seemed genuinely surprised.

“I could—find,” because he didn’t keep it, “coffee?”

“Terrible stuff,” Crowley said. “No, I’ll take the tea.” He retreated to the couch and collapsed into it in a way that should have been graceless and yet managed to be a perfect ballet of coordinated movements. It was a mastery of moving parts, and then he was slouching into the couch, one arm draped along the back of it and the other hanging loosely at his side so his hand was along the inside of his thigh. “What sort of underpants are you wearing today, angel?”

“Briefs,” Aziraphale said. “The white cotton sort.”

Crowley made a face at that, as quick as a sneeze.

“I know they’re not thought of as attractive,” Aziraphale conceded. “It’s not about the looks—nobody is meant to see them. You didn’t make a face when I told you I was wearing white boxers.”

“I did make a face,” Crowley countered. “It was the same face, you just didn’t see it. Don’t pretend like clothes aren’t about more than being useful. I know all about your _standards_ , Aziraphale. I know you, you stood in front of a mirror for twenty minutes convincing yourself that nobody would see them so it was perfectly alright to wear the ugly things.”

As a matter of fact it was only five minutes. The convincing was rather simple because the briefs did exactly what he had hoped they would in regard to controlling the new complication that his anti-Christ given penis has introduced. While he would have preferred something more aesthetically pleasing than your average pair of white briefs, he couldn’t discount they allowed him to worry about other things. “Sugar?”

“No,” Crowley said. He accepted the steaming hot cup of tea like he had any intention of drinking it and almost immediately set it on the table in front of him. Aziraphale didn’t sigh (he already knew that the tea was only for show) but retreat back to his usual chair. Crowley watched him with scrunched up eyebrows and a quick side-glance to the empty space on the couch beside him. 

“Today was lovely,” Aziraphale said. It had been a very lovely day. They’d met for lunch and that had gone on quite a bit longer than anyone might have thought was necessary but there were several new items to taste on the menu. Crowley had invited him to walk through a lovely flower garden and they might still have been walking through it, wandering in and out of such lovely displays of color, getting closer-and-closer to holding hands except for the storm clouds. 

And the kissing, well the kissing at the door was very, very nice. It had left him with a heat in his belly that wouldn’t cool for a while yet. Crowley always looked at him like he knew exactly what sort of heat and that did nothing to cool it. The demon was nodding as he relaxed into place, “it wasn’t bad.”

\--

Two hours ago, give or take, Aziraphale had been breathless with wonder and absolute joy, saying something along the lines of: _allow me to show you_ as he abandoned his cooling cocoa and the comfort of a close conversation to hunt down the specific book that he had been talking about. There had been a story behind it, something about Crowley attempting to tempt the author into blasphemy or (honestly, the whole story sounded so dull that Crowley couldn’t bring himself to conjure the memory of his own supposed actions). He hadn’t listened to all the fine details, just to the ending part where Aziraphale had spent a decade or two hanging around the author protecting him from evil wiles so he could finish his novels.

Aziraphale was very proud of his novels. He sank into the space next to Crowley on the couch like he’d had no idea that his presence would have been welcome hours-and-hours ago. Like he had no concept that he was the worst tease that this planet had ever had the misfortune to meet. (And that Crowley did love that about him, how carefully and deliberately Aziraphale had to think through things and then how suddenly and impulsively he acted.) Aziraphale treated books with reverence, and he shared them the way lovers might have thought they shared their own hearts. “I know you don’t read books,” Aziraphale said when Crowley was busy watching his face looking at the book in wonder, “I could read it to you? Just—just a few pages, if you’ve got the time.”

Crowley had nothing but an eternity. He stretched out to find a comfortable arrangement of limbs, leaning ever so slightly against Aziraphale and he nodded, “I’ve got time.”

But it had been hours now, and Crowley had no idea of any of the words that had been read to him and Aziraphale had long ago given up actually saying any words at all. He’d stuttered into silence as the long hours of the night started giving way to the early-early hours of the morning. He was very much like a warm statue, unmoving except for the turn of a page and the slight crinkle around his eyes when he found a part he liked. 

Crowley could have left, maybe he should have. His plants might thing he’d gotten soft, or he’d forgotten all about them. They might make excuses for themselves as they wilted, claiming neglect and lack of watering. Aziraphale might not even have noticed his departure, and yet—it was too perfect just there to move a single muscle. No, he _lounged_ and he absorbed the warmth with his eyes clothes and all his thoughts slowing to crawl. That was the thing about time, it moved too quickly and too slowly and always at exactly the same pace. It was just the speed of your memory that changed. 

\--

Aziraphale wouldn’t say that he’d lost track of Crowley, but that did not mean that the statement wasn’t true. (Just that while being true, it wasn’t really a statement until it was said out loud. If nobody asked him if he’d misplaced a demon he was supposed to have been reading to, he certainly wouldn’t have to confess to have gotten caught up in reading and forgotten that there was audience expecting him to say the words out loud. He wouldn’t have had to further say that this had gone on so long that it was daytime again and he had no idea where the night had gone.) It was a difficult task to look for a demon in a bookshop when he had no idea at all where Crowley might have gone. It didn’t appear that he was still there, and it seemed more likely that he’d gotten bored and left than it did that he was taking on an unusual form and hiding among the weathered spines of Aziraphale’s book collection.

There was nothing to do about it (well there was, but he didn’t want to place a phone call along the lines of ‘oh sorry I forgot you were there, any chance we could meet up for lunch and kissing? I like kissing’). Instead of fretting, or more accurately while trying to distract himself from fretting he decided he might as well open for business. He was hoping for a vexing customer to insist on purchasing a book that he’d been looking for. He would have settled for the sort that wandered in, got lost around the sides of the shelves and then showed up asking for whatever passed for popular fiction these days. Aziraphale was fond of explaining how this wasn’t that sort of bookshop. It wasn’t that he would never own such books, just that he wouldn’t own them _yet_. 

The best his sluggish business hours managed was a man in a rumpled T-shirt yawning to himself as he stared at the same shelf for the better part of an hour and a young lady wearing a mustard colored dress and an obscenely large bag with dangling baubles that alerted everyone to her whereabouts.

Aziraphale was hiding in the backroom, trying to search back through his memory for the exact moment that Crowley had moved and finding that his memory was filled up with the book he’d read and absent any reality beyond that. (A good book did that to someone, but it was inconvenient in this instance). He was resting his hand on the phone, working up the courage to just admitting that he’d lost Crowley and how he meant to apologize for it. (You know how I get; I am very sorry. We could meet for an early supper and kissing. No books, I promise.) 

Yes, Aziraphale was all set to make the call when he was interrupted by a shrill scream of surprise followed by a sluggish snap of what one might call surprise if surprise could be lukewarm and not very interested at all. The shrill scream gave way to a clattering sound and the yawning man said something very likely to be:

“That’s a rather large snake.”

“Get it away from me!” the shrill screamer managed.

Aziraphale hurried around the corner, not at all worried about the humans involved (but noting that the occupants of his shop had increased by one older lady sitting idly in a seat in the corner, flipping through the graying pages of a book without a single care in the world). He saw Crowley (who was, indeed, a very large serpent at the moment) slithering off the windowsill, taking every book that had been carefully balanced there with him as he went. It must have been a bit like a horror movie to the humans, the moment stretched and stretched until it became nearly ridiculous. Crowley’s snake body slithering in an endless motion, his head already rising up to stare at the shrill woman in the mustard dress and the end of his body still lost somewhere among the books he was displacing. “There you are,” Aziraphale said without meaning to. 

“Oh, he’s a pet snake?” the man asked, “what sort is he?”

“I don’t care what sort he is!” the woman screamed, “remove him immediately!”

Crowley’s tongue flickered out with more sarcasm and intent than the average snake could manage. He didn’t move politely out of the way (not that he would have in any circumstances) but start to circle the distraught woman. The thick length of his body rippling against itself as it built up a coil at her feet. 

This made the woman lose all concept of words entirely, the only noise she was able to make was a constant, low, scream of terror that whispered out of her gaping mouth. It was very deliberate, and one couldn’t mistake the intention to terrify the woman. That left only grasping for the reason that Crowley (who had been content to lounge in his window all this time, apparently) had interrupted an afternoon of napping to assault this woman. 

“I don’t understand,” Aziraphale said. He hadn’t moved from where he’d stopped when he caught sight of Crowley. If snakes were capable of rolling their eyes, the demon might have done so. The best he could manage was a sort of rolling of his head that conveyed the same frustration and annoyance. He ducked his head, so his body slid into the large space between the woman’s shoulder and the heavy hanging sack against her thigh. 

“What is it doing?” the woman squealed. She didn’t stay still to find out but shrug her arm so that the bag and therefore Crowley (who was caught in the strap) fell to the floor. It sounded very lumpy, and heavy as it struck the ground and the woman jumped out of the snake coil and landed against the now empty window display. “What sort of business are you running here!”

Aziraphale stepped forward only far enough to retrieve the fallen bag, and to run his hand across Crowley’s scales to be sure no injury had been sustained by the strap. 

“It is very strange behavior for a snake,” the yawning man said.

“Nonsense,” Aziraphale countered, “he’s a perfectly good, average snake.” That just happened to be a demon. And that demon just happened to be winding his way around Aziraphale’s leg as he pulled open the bag and discovered (to the surprise of nobody) several of his books tucked inside. 

“Those are mine!” the woman snapped. “I brought them in with me.”

She certainly did not. Aziraphale was at a momentary loss as to how to respond. It wasn’t that he had never been robbed, there had been many attempts in the long years he’d occupied this space. The books always found their way back to him, and he’d never really bothered to wonder how they’d moved from one shelf to another. The very few times he’d caught the person in the act he had just given them a stern and disapproving stare that made them very sorry. Nobody had ever tried to lie to him so obviously before. 

Crowley had managed to crawl up his leg and around his waist and looped over his arm so his head was very near Aziraphale’s face. He was staring at the woman with none of the momentary loss, there was a gathering intensity to the stare, an ominous quiet that made the whole interior of the bookshop feel as if it were being filled up with static electricity. A concentrated fury was waiting for a final spark, and the quiet was making the humans stare with rapt horror. 

If there was a home office to report to, Aziraphale would have been obliged to thwart the wiles of this particular snake. Seeing how he was a free agent, and a crime had been committed (or would have been) against him, he saw no reason to do anything more than see that nobody but the perpetrator got caught in the gathering energy.

And it popped, like a soap bubble, as Crowley’s tongue slithered out of his mouth. The woman screamed as if she’d been struck and she ran so quickly to the door that she slapped into it and didn’t seem to notice. She was through it in a moment and down the street screaming as she went. Crowley relaxed against him, slithering just high enough that he was wrapped around Aziraphale’s shoulders and chest and waist with a bit of his tail still looped around one of his thighs. 

“He’s a good looking snake,” the man said. “you know what sort?”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, “he’s—well, I’m afraid he’s the only one of his kind. A very unique snake, not sure what breed or species just, they told me he was the only one. An original. Business hours are over for today, if you wouldn’t mind making your way out.”

The old woman in the corner set the book she was looking at back on the shelf nearest her chair and left without a single word about the screaming woman, or the snake, or how it wasn’t even lunch time yet. Aziraphale locked the door behind them with Crowley still clinging to him and when it was only them, alone, he said, “I am sorry I got so distracted last night. But I suppose you enjoyed yourself just now.”

Crowley’s tongue ticked his cheek and then he was very suddenly back in his human form looking smug and pleased with himself. “Yes, I did, thank you.” He had one hand on his back and a sort of grimace on his face, “it’s hard on the back sleeping on all those piled up books. You might consider a pillow of some sort for your window display.”

“Might I?” Aziraphale said. He looked at the mess on the floor, “I suppose if I don’t want to have to pick up all the books every time you feel like terrorizing my customers…”

“Customers,” Crowley repeated with a laugh. “Angel, you don’t have _customers_. You’d have to sell something to have customers.” 

Just then, with a please smile on his face and hiccups of pink in his face, Crowley was as beautiful and breath-taking as he’d ever been. It would have taken a will stronger than Aziraphale possessed to deny that all he wanted just then was to taste the triumphant smugness resting on Crowley’s face. Since there was nobody to see, or care, or comment, Aziraphale saw no reason at all not to slide his hand up to rest on Crowley’s face, to let his thumb trace the curve of his smile. He was smiling back, looking at nothing but how vulnerable Crowley looked just then and how _soft_. 

“Careful angel, if you go off rewarding me when I misbehave I might get ideas.”

Aziraphale kissed him rather than bother with banter. They were set to repeat the day before, to find a door to shove themselves against and that was just fine because Aziraphale had incomplete fantasies about what he exactly he wanted out of a rough kiss against a locked door. The only minor edit he thought was necessary was the bit where Crowley was the one doing the pushing and Aziraphale was the one having his back imprinted with the windows. 

\--

Any human who happened to wander past into the bookshop, or wander past Aziraphale on the street or have the distinct pleasure of seeing him at all might have been forgiven for the mistaken impression they had of him. There was no denying at all that the man held a certain undeniable resemblance to a generously stuffed teddy bear. You could hardly spend more than a moment with the angel before you started developing notions that he was as soft as overboiled pasta. He seemed a great deal like a pushover. (And he might have been, what with how complacently he stood still in the face of his almost certain death any number of times.) And humans could be forgiven for their ideas and their assumptions. They were on earth so briefly they couldn’t have begun to understand that regardless of how soft Aziraphale was, and how _good_ he was and how _nice_ , he was also entirely immovable.

Aziraphale was long thoughts and quick actions. Certainly it had taken six thousand years of indifference and inaction but then Adam had made a human _assumption_ and now—suddenly—Aziraphale was pushing Crowley against the front doors of his beloved bookshop, kissing him with unreserved hunger while his hands did the slow, mortal work of undoing buttons and pushing fabric out of the way.

It was just that, if in a split second, the angel stepped away and offered him tea and biscuits it would have made just as much sense as if he’d gotten fed up with restraint and stripped them both naked with a snap of his fingers. (Crowley was hoping for the second, if he were being perfectly honest.) But Aziraphale didn’t seem to be in a hurry to do either, and why would he be when it took him a full hour to eat a single course in any meal? No, he had to savor each, individual taste gathered by the brush of his tongue against Crowley’s. He had to _enjoy_ the way his soft hands felt sliding down Crowley’s ribs. He was fixing his grip, working out how he wanted to touch and how he wanted it to feel. Because there was reverence and love and care in the gentleness of his touch and then his hands were low-low on Crowley’s waist and the angel’s grip tightened so suddenly it made him gasp.

“No good?” Aziraphale asked. His breath was heavy, and his lips were bright pink.

“No.” Crowley corrected as he used the space to shove the collar of Aziraphale’s perfectly preserved coat back off his shoulders, “ _good_.” He wouldn’t have been so crass and careless as to let the coat hit the ground. (Not with all the miracles that had gone into keeping it in such good condition, many of them his own demonic miracles. No that coat would never touch the ground as long as he was around to prevent it.) As soon as it was free from Aziraphale’s arms it was hanging in the closet where it would be safe. The hands that had loosened up from his hips found their way back.

Kissing was a lovely, delightfully human activity. He’d always been wary of the notion of it—all that spit passing back and forth. The very notion of disease being freely swapped among the masses seemed to him like a terrible idea. (There simply had to be a demon at the root of the nonsense, he just hadn’t ever found any proof of that.) But there was something inexplicably perfect about how his arm fit around Aziraphale’s shoulders and how closely their bodies pressed together and how sweet and inviting the angel tasted. 

In the interest of keeping things even (and perhaps initiating a escalation in this encounter) Crowley shrugged his own jacket off. The vest was pulled along with it since there were no buttons keeping it in place. He didn’t care that much about it getting trampled, so it fell to the floor with a whisper of noise and he kicked it to the side. Aziraphale hummed in approval as his grip settled back on Crowley’s hips and he pulled him forward, so they were rubbing together with absolutely no mistaking the intention.

No mistaking at all. 

It wasn’t as romantic as he had assumed things might go the first time around, but it certainly was as passionate as he’d hoped it would be. That was the key, letting passion just overtake you. Just wrapping your arms around the one that you loved and grinding back against his body in a way that said: ‘why yes, I do think we should adjourn the bedroom darling’. Except that Crowley wouldn’t say darling (Aziraphale would) and he was content with the floor right by the door.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said like it had never once occurred to him that there was a reason why humans went along with all the messy sex nonsense this long. He was looking down between their bodies, where they were pressed together. His face was a mask of genuine shock, and yet his hips hadn’t stuttered at all, they were rolling up against Crowley’s with persistence. “That’s very nice,” he said.

“It’s nicer without pants, I hear.” Crowley had every intention of reducing Aziraphale’s layers of clothing to zero. He was willing to cheat after all this waiting he’d been put through, a minor miracle wouldn’t even take a sneeze’s worth of effort. 

“You hear?” Aziraphale repeated. That did it. Right in the middle of their most successful attempt at sex yet, Aziraphale stumbled across something that would require Long Thoughts and all the simple pleasure of his nearness and the growing hardness in his pants, the tightness of his breath, the low whine of his approval disappeared! They were two distinct shapes again, separated by a foot’s worth of space and the uncrossable distance of Aziraphale’s good intentions. “I thought you’d _know_. I had just assumed you’d indulged before.”

“Why the devil would you assume that?” Crowley demanded. “Because I’m a demon? Because I’m,” he didn’t want to say the word _slutty_ but there was a general consensus in all those that saw him that he exuded a certain energy. There were many words for that energy, but one of the most common boiled down to words synonymous with slutty. “A demon…wait,” he hadn’t meant to repeat himself.

“Well,” Aziraphale said, the lecherous blush on his face made his indecision adorable and lewd. “No. I just—I mean, you’re so worldly.” (That was another of those words that meant the same.) “No, I didn’t meant that! I just meant, I— I don’t know what I meant, but we can’t,” he stretched out his hand to indicate the very thing the had been doing successfully a moment ago, “here, not when it’s your first time.”

“It’s your first time too!”

“It’s meant to be special.”

There was a demon responsible for that particular bullshit too. Crowley was completely sure that evil had constructed the bullshit of virginity and the necessity of love just so they could corrupt more people for hell. There was absolutely nothing wrong with frottage by the front door. After six thousand years of falling in love, Crowley would have been happy with a hand job in the handicap stall. He required no romance or pretense or— “Special?” he repeated, “special how? I don’t need flower petals and music, angel.”

“No,” Aziraphale tutted. He shrugged his shoulders and there was his jacket back again, as sure as impenetrable armor. He was _thinking_ again. “Of course not, don’t be absurd. But it should be special, Crowley. It can’t be like this.” And his face was so fond, and soft, and sincere. His hands gripped at Crowley’s lax ones like they had reached any sort of agreement. “I’ll just clean up this mess and head out to find some nice pillows for the window. We’ll set a date.”

“We’ll set a date?” Crowley repeated. “What’s wrong with today’s date?”

Judging from the stare he received, today’s date was _not_ special enough. There was no point in fighting, he just sighed and nodded and Aziraphale kissed him sweetly on the mouth as a reward.


	3. Chapter 3

If it were a lie, it was only one by the virtue of the entire concept being made-up and stupid to start with. It was a lie by reason of omission. “I mean it, angel. Everyone says so, blow jobs do not count.” The full truth being that the idea of virginity was stupid to start with. Sex was sex; you didn’t see anyone going out of their way to plan something special for the first time they meant to masturbate. And if the first time they figure out how to make their downstairs it’s come to life and achieve orgasm happened to be with their own dominant hand, why did it matter about anything else that happened after? Crowley’s body had been given to him, and only to him, and the only human, angel or demon that had any business caring about what had already been done with it or would soon be done to it was him.

“That sounds very unlikely,” Aziraphale answered. The background around him was smudged, and soft-toned. The colors were all earthy and sort of dim—not likely to be anywhere that Crowley lived, and honestly, if they were bluntly talking about sex they weren’t likely to be anywhere in public either.

Bookshop then. Crowley liked the bookshop, it smelled like dust, and wool jumpers and spilt wine. He liked how Aziraphale was always _at ease_ there. “I don’t understand it either, the whole mess is very human if you ask me. No telling why putting your penis into one hole counts and doesn’t for another but I’ve always heard it, blow jobs do not count.”

Aziraphale couldn’t be moved (not an inch, not a fraction of an inch) from any idea that he truly believed to be true. He couldn’t be nudged, or pushed, or even guided along any faster than he wanted to move toward any conclusion that he wasn’t ready to embrace. But he was fully capable of seizing the appearance of a loophole when it allowed him to do something he already wanted to do. And there he was, lips pressed together, eyes dropping to stare at Crowley’s crotch (instead of his face), humming to himself about whether or not he wanted to believe this. “If you’re sure?” he said.

“I’m completely sure,” Crowley agreed. He had intentions of kissing Aziraphale (because he very much did like that) and wrapping his arms around him. He had thought he would go first, and that there must have been a chair or a couch or a bed somewhere nearby. If not, there could be with just a little bit of effort. He was all set to try out whatever he could get away with and—

Very suddenly, Aziraphale was holding a pillow. It was a soft, overstuffed, satin pillow with tassels on the corner and fringe all around it. There were no baubles or buttons sewn in the center so it was soundless as it dropped to the floor. Aziraphale, who had never moved at faster than a snail’s pace in his whole life, was kneeling on the pillow as if it had been his own idea. His fingers were slipping into Crowley’s front pockets to pull him forward as he ran his tongue across his lips, and when he looked up, he was as angelic as fresh-fallen-snow, as pure as clear-water, devoid of anything sullied or indecent at all, “you’ll need to take these off, dear.”

Crowley couldn’t have sworn that he expected his argument to lead to anything, much less to this moment. He hadn’t exactly planned out what would happen next, and having no idea how to proceed, the dream began to melt around them. He was _trying_ to hold on, trying to imagine pushing his pants off, trying to imagine how Aziraphale’s hair would feel between his fingers, trying to _force_ an image of—

Of what?

Of an angel on his knees, with a mouth full of demon cock, humming his happy, lewd sounds of appreciation? Of his best friend sucking dick? 

Of Aziraphale stripped right down to the skin, on his knees, of how soft his hands would be and where he would put them, and how warm his tongue would be and—

No.

Crowley had _imagination_ but the dream fell apart around him, and he was left in the reality of his empty flat. He was slouching in his chair, eyes opening to stare at his wilting dick. He could have made the most of the situation, provided manual stimulation to make the whole exercise worthwhile, but what good was making do when even his dreams were disappointing.

The problem was that he had kissed Aziraphale. He had put his hands on him. He had been so _close_ to stripping them naked and having his vile, demon-y way with him. It wasn’t how he’d imagined, there was a good deal less stuttering and blushing than he’d imagined. (But what was his imagination against the reality of Aziraphale? It was useless. It couldn’t compare. It could hardly mimic.)

Besides, Crowley didn’t _need_ to have sex with Aziraphale to be happy. He only needed a bit of a distraction like a hobby, or a special interest. He needed to find a purpose, a project that could occupy all this idle time he had now.

\--

The underwear were not a significant problem. That was to say they did exactly the job Aziraphale required of them without creating any new problems he’d need to further solve. Certainly, there was no reason why he was standing in front of the mirror wearing nothing but a white undershirt and his white briefs, trying to assess—

Assess what is what left him in a bit of pickle. He didn’t have any sort of idea what a man’s underwear should _look_. He could only assume that the ones he was wearing at present looked as they were supposed to look because they did look very much like the photograph on the packaging. He had no frame of reference as to what sort of underwear was considered ‘fashionable’ (or why on earth anyone would care about fashion for a piece of clothing that nobody could see). He certainly had no idea what sort could be considered sexually attractive because had never been in a situation where he had ever had anything even remotely sexual to look at before.

Perhaps that was what he was assessing, this body’s potential for sexual attraction. It was a very nice body (from the inside, as far as he was concerned). It was exactly the sort of body that he wanted. It kept him warm in cold weather, it carried him wherever he needed to go, it allowed his clothes to hang exactly as he wanted them to. It had seen him through—well not this one exactly but one that looked exactly like this one—six thousand years. Humans were relaxed when they were around him and that was not entirely because he was an angel. They looked at him and they saw him as a strange, fluffy, harmless (gay) man. He wasn’t ugly and he wasn’t the most strikingly handsome either.

Aziraphale did like this body. He just didn’t know how to present it in the way he wanted it presented in this particularly state of undress. What was to say that Crowley wouldn’t want to take his time about removing their clothes? What was to say they might not reach this layer and the whole affair be called off. Arousal was a subtle, fickle thing.

One moment, Aziraphale had a hand on his chest, and the next it was on his gut and he was thinking of how Crowley would feel against his skin. The demon was always just a little bit cooler than him. His limbs were long, and strong, and quick when he moved. Aziraphale could almost imagine how he’d feel pressed all against his back, and how low his voice would be whispering in his ear.

“You’re being ridiculous, angel,” he’d say if he were here. His hands would start where Aziraphale’s had started, up against his chest. His fingers were long, and sure, and they’d drag down his shirt, stretching the cotton so the neckline pulled. “It’s not what you’re wearing,” he’d say. There might be a skipped beat, like a breath held too long, when one of Crowley’s arm tightened around his chest and the other hand dropped to press across the front of his serviceable white briefs. His voice like a wet promise against Aziraphale’s ear: “it’s how quickly I can take it off.”

Arousal was a fickle thing, making his whole body heat up at just the thought of how Crowley’s hand would feel on him. It was greedy, and desperate, and not at all made of common sense. Aziraphale’s hand was squeezing his own penis but his mind was making up ideas about how different it would be if his palm were cooler and his fingers were just slightly thinner, slightly longer. He was trying to think up how it would feel to be touched and—

He just didn’t know how to proceed. He didn’t know what came next, what words Crowley would use, and how he would feel, and the sounds he would make. He didn’t quite know what he even wanted it go.

Like he didn’t know if these were exactly the underwear that showed his body to any potential viewer the way he saw it, and felt about it. And absent any idea of how to proceed, the arousal that had been so sharp and so present a moment ago flickered, and fluttered away, leaving behind only a memory.

Aziraphale was left frowning at the mirror, and himself, and the opportunity to find out the answer to all these questions when he’d had it. No, he’d gotten caught up in the idea of ceremony when neither of them required it. Or maybe it was only his nerves getting to him again. They didn’t need ceremony for sex reasons, but anyone could be forgiven for needing a little time to adjust to the idea of doing something they hadn’t done in the past six thousand plus years. 

He was standing in front of the mirror staring at his underpants for Heaven’s sake. Aziraphale had plenty of intuitive ideas about where he wanted to put his hands-on Crowley’s body but that didn’t mean he knew how to do it right. Or even that he had the right sort of ideas to start with. Or it might be that arousal (being fickle as it was) might fail them, and what a disaster it would be to go through all the effort of trying only to be stalled out by an uninterested sex organ.

Those sorts of things could happen. “Oh dear,” he said to his reflection and his perfectly plain white underpants.

\--

Perception was an important part of a proper temptation. Any demon could wander up to any human and whisper something like: hello there, wouldn’t it be a great idea to burn down your neighbor’s house? He’s an arrogant bastard anyway, it would serve him right! Any demon could manage to inspire lust in any man who had ever felt like he deserved to get what he wanted.

That was the thing about it, the real work was the long hours arranging things so the humans _wanted_ something. It was all about building up the expectation, and just when the humans were so convinced it was owed to them, that they deserved it, it was about pulling the rug out from under their feet. Maybe fake ads on social media and switching around price stickers on sale items weren’t the most inspired depths of evil that a demon could reach, sure they weren’t the Spanish inquisition or a bloody revolution. But the humans did all the big ideas themselves, you just had to get them started thinking that they deserved something and it was someone else’s fault they didn’t have it.

A demon could do an awful lot with very little if he was just smart enough to know how to get started.

Crowley didn’t enjoy coffee shops, at least not well enough to sit in one alone but desperate times and all that. He was stationed at a prime spot, with a cup of whatever passed for drinkable, taking up as much space as the limits of his human body would allow. Most humans were too polite to outright call him names, but he could feel the building sensation of annoyance that he’d gone off and claimed the best spot in the house when he wasn’t even drinking anything, or doing anything or meeting with anyone. It grew like a song gaining volume, filling up the space around him with a cottony sensation of annoyance. That annoyance spread out to everyone that came into contact with it. Folks who had been enjoying their day just fine before this moment were stepping into the establishment and finding their moods soured. Babies cried, grown men were scowling and Crowley rested his fingers around his cup without any intention to drink the insides.

All around him, people were remembering things that a good mood had allowed them to forget. They were fixating on yesterday’s conversations, missed opportunities and forgotten occasions. They were caught up on bad traffic, annoying errands and romantic missteps.

Romantic missteps like accidentally admitting you had spent six thousand years on this planet and hadn’t ever rubbed your naked body on another naked body. Or romantic missteps like realizing that you only had yourself to blame for indulging your angel’s various whims continuously throughout history. Could Crowley really blame Aziraphale for thinking he would always get his way when he had (in fact) always gotten exactly what he’d wanted exactly how he’d wanted it? Who could really be blamed for whatever special circumstances Aziraphale came up with for their first time? 

The moron that decided virginity was a thing?  
God for creating Aziraphale exactly the way he was?  
Satan for having a child, putting that child on Earth, and therefore starting the chain of events that led Aziraphale to having a penis to start with?

“Why does it have to be special?” Crowley asked. He’d meant to ask himself, quietly, but he said it outloud. All the nice ladies and gentlemen already annoyed at him were scowling in his direction, thinking unkind things about the sort of man that looked like he didn’t eat (because he didn’t) and sprawled his careless, long limbs wherever he wanted them. The sort of man that didn’t care for anyone’s day but his own. “It doesn’t have to be special, what does special mean anyway?”

They could have been done with it already, and moved on, and thinking about other things. They could have been discussing the possibility of moving to a new city, buying a cottage, learning a skill together. They could do couples dancing or painting, or Aziraphale could have taken up knitting and filled the whole bookshop with fluffy cream hats he refused to sell. Aziraphale couldn’t sell the hats, he could only make the hats, and keep the hats, and walk around touching the hats whenever he was feeling wistful about something. He’d tut to himself when they got out of order, and he’d fret when they got smudged, but the whole building would be stuffed to the rafters with homemade hats and he’d refuse to sell any.

(Crowley would steal them, and give them away to orphans and little girls with missing front teeth and grown men with dirty faces and bad luck that looked like they needed them. Here, have a little angel blessing, good day sir. Aziraphale would know but he wouldn’t do anything about it.)

But no, they couldn’t move on because they couldn’t have sex because it had to be _special_.

\--

The dishes were empty, but they weren’t carried away yet. It wasn’t typical service in a restaurant that looked as nice as this one seemed to be. Of course, it was hard to tell how nice this one was when everything had a sort of fuzziness to it like the setting wasn’t important at all. He could see the details in perfect clarity, the wine in the glasses, the gleam of Crowley’s untouched silverware. The gold glint at the edges of the plates, and the way Crowley’s knuckles were creased as his hand rested loosely around the base of his drink. He was watching, relaxed and waiting, like he always was when Aziraphale was taking a very long time. 

“So,” he said, and he thought he could feel the napkin under his hand but he couldn’t really be sure, it might have just been a figment of his imagination. “I went to the shop today, to see about finding something more,” (attractive), “aesthetically pleasing. Underwear-wise.”

“Oh?” Crowley asked. There was interest in his voice but no indication of how deep it ran, of how he was imagining what sort of underclothes Aziraphale had chosen to wear to this date, or imagining how he’d like to take them off later. 

“I didn’t make any purchases, there’s too many choices.” (And that was true.) “What sort of underclothes do you wear?”

Crowley’s eyebrows lifted; his forehead became a maze of wrinkles. He was sliding forward out of his laid-back-lean as his lips curled up into a smile that could only have looked perfectly at home on a demon’s face. His amusement was pink in his cheeks and a flash of white teeth between his spreading lips. His voice was low, and dirty, hushed and not quite hissing, “what makes you think I’m wearing any?”

“Oh. I had only assumed.” The interior of Azirphale’s body felt like it was at _war_. He was flushed with a sort of heat that landed deep in his gut, the sort that started stirring between your thighs. The kind that had only felt like a distant tingle before, like a lost sensation wandering around his skin for an outlet and finding none had simply evaporated. No, this sensation knew exactly where it was going, it was warm and present and thickening inside his own underpants. And the rest of him was itching with annoyance, and disbelief, because Aziraphale had only had a penis for a very short time now and as far as he could tell (because he’d noticed, not because he’d looked) Crowley had been in possession of a penis for a good deal of time. Sure, it wasn’t necessarily recently (at least, Aziraphale did not think Nanny Ashtoreth had a penis but she might have) but it was still longer than a few days. The point was that Aziraphale was new to the ownership of a penis, but he had already come to understand that having one meant dealing with it. He could hardly wear _his_ pants without additional support and his pants were significantly looser than Crowley’s. “You really don’t?”

Crowley just shook his head, like he was as disappointed by this failure of a daydream as Aziraphale was for having wasted his time having it. There were plenty of patrons in his bookshop, and plenty of things to keep him busy, but here was standing by a bookshelf with a book in his hand, absorbed in thinking about Crowley’s underwear. (Or lack thereof. And if the latter, why that made him feel a dirty, warm thrill. It didn’t seem like an inherently sexy thing, the lack of undergarments. Sure, it made undressing slightly less of a lengthy process but that didn’t seem to be a good enough reason for any part of his body to start tingling. He certainly wouldn’t have felt the same if Crowley were missing a pair of socks.)

A smarter angel might have shaken the whole notion right out of his head, but Aziraphale found himself turning his head to stare at the phone from some distance. It wouldn’t have been too much of an imposition to place a call. Humans called each other all the time for nonsense things. Aziraphale heard them all the time, out in the streets and waiting for seats at restaurants. He heard them in his bookshop, or at least he had heard them before a sudden sort of foggy cloud had overtaken the shop. Now it seemed anytime someone wanted to use a mobile phone inside, it was overtaken by static and dropped calls. The few that tried left in a huff, and found that reception almost always seemed to improve as soon as they were through the doors. (Almost as if by magic.) 

Aziraphale could just call Crowley, and ask what sort of underclothes he preferred. 

\--

It was important to note that other than a few minor incidents (the most recent of which involved a collision with a lady on a bicycle and a rather impressive amount of hellfire) the Bentley had never suffered any real damage due to Crowley’s driving. The angelic objections of his friend aside, it was perfectly possible to do ninety in central London as long as everything that you passed was aware that it needed to move out of your way. Crowley had simply made it easier for everything else to realize that they needed to move and therefore had never had to worry about what he might hit.

(Anathema Device excluded, of course.)

Crowley had heard all that nonsense that humans liked to say about how time slowed down when you were in a life or death situation. Crowley didn’t have much to say about the nature of life and death, other than Death wasn’t always a pleasant thing to be around and that life was largely unfair. (At least to people who expected fairness, and those were Crowley’s favorite sort because they were always so easy to mess with.) Crowley had never really had to face the idea of real death; the worst he’d come close to was an inconvenient discorporation (as his angel liked to say). He certainly had never had such a moment of time slowing while he was in the car. 

“What?” he managed to croak out into the silence that was ringing so loudly through the interior of the Bentley that it felt as if he had been transported to some unnecessarily grandiose theater to view an encore performance of whatever opera was currently the favorite. His heart (which was mostly for show) was pounding so hard in his chest that it felt as if his head were filling up with blood to the point of bursting like a balloon. 

“There’s too many options,” Aziraphale was saying. He was saying it in his bookshop which was much less far away now than it had been a moment ago. The cars that Crowley cut in front of were furious at being shoved abruptly to one side and then jerked back into their rightful places again. The drivers of the diverted cars were experiencing a sort of road rage that couldn’t be directed at anything because they couldn’t swear that anything at all had just happened. The rage simply overtook them and wouldn’t ease for at least the duration of their travels. “I just thought if I knew where to start.”

“I thought you’d already sorted this out. I thought you had the white ones.” Crowley could have told him that this wasn’t the sort of conversation that friends had with one another. He could have, and he might have, but they weren’t exactly friends anymore. You couldn’t consider yourself only friends after you’d had your tongue in each other’s mouths. You could be friends with the angel you were having naughty daytime fantasies about. 

“But there’s so many more,” Aziraphale said. 

Crowley stared at the phone screen, and it stared back. There were many different answers to the question he had been asked. It would be lying to give any answer independent of the fellow answers, but it would also take too long to explain out the exact decision-making-paradigm he used to determine exactly what sort of underclothes he wore, if he chose to wear any at all. “It depends on the pants,” Crowley said (at last).

“It depends on the pants,” Aziraphale repeated. He repeated it the way he savored his food, the way he might have repeated a new decree from God herself. He let it roll around his mouth while he said it, tasted each word on his tongue, and then sighed. “This is all too complicated. I only wear the one pair of pants.”

“Look,” Crowley said, “I’m coming over, angel. If there’s anyone in the bookshop you should ask them to leave before I get there.” He didn’t stay on the line to hear whatever sort of objections Aziraphale was going to offer up. (Not that he usually offered any objections to reasons to close his bookshop with no warning whatsoever. Just that this time he would based solely on the fact that Crowley had asked him to do it. Angels were known to be contrary in that manner. All love your neighbor until they saw their neighbor and then it was just one minor annoyance away from stoning your neighbor to death.) 

\--

What Aziraphale was currently in need of was a proper bedroom. It struck him as an odd thing to think of as he ushered out the last reluctant patron with some stuttering promises that they would most likely be able to return tomorrow. At some point, he was very likely to open the shop unless the next few minutes of his life ended awkwardly or exceptionally, then he would be unlikely to open. It just depended on how things went, so it would be best to come back tomorrow and find out if the shop was going to open. All the same books would be there, unless they weren’t.

(The books, sometimes, after a good deal of time sitting around with other books, seemed to develop their own sense of when they were available and when they weren’t. Aziraphale didn’t rotate them, and they were always exactly where he thought they’d be, but customers always seemed to have trouble finding them.)

But a bedroom. Aziraphale had a entire flat that was just over the bookshop. He had several rooms, and a kitchen, and none of them were exactly what he’d deem as a living space. In fact, if one were to go upstairs to the flat and have a look around the room that might have commonly been used as a bedroom they might be unsurprised to find that it had become a sort of storage space for books. There was the vague shape of a bed if you knew how to look for it, namely by the sag created by years and years of books piled on it. You might also excavate a bedside table, and an old lamp if you had the urge to dig for it. His kitchen was identifiable only by cupboards and the space where most humans put their couches and TVs was labyrinth of aging books just waiting for a gentle breeze to knock them all over like so many dominos. 

Certainly, romantic affairs required romantic spaces, or at very least comfortable ones. Crowley deserved a bed, at least, and the best that Aziraphale had to offer now was an old couch in a crowded bookshop. 

But he was jumping ahead of himself again. He was caught up in the possible future when it could be that Crowley was coming over to announce he was tired of the whole attempt and he would be heading off to America to start some trouble. (America was perfectly poised for some trouble to be started, it would take almost no effort at all.) “Oh dear,” he said to the ceiling that separated him from his unhospitable flat. Before he could decide to do something about it, the door opened behind him (as if it had never been closed) and shut again to the sound of snapping fingers.

Crowley was pulling his sunglasses off his face with as much aggravation as he’d ever shown about anything. His whole mood was as black as a raincloud, filling up the space between them with implied thunder and lightning. He dropped his glasses to the side as his shoulders shrugged and his jacket was sliding back off his skinny arms. It hit the ground with the jangle of keys in the pocket, already forgotten as Crowley stepped forward. His arms were reaching out and his long-long fingers were sliding across Aziraphale’s face as he tried to work out if he meant to apologize or ask what was going on. (It was confusing, as all these new things were.) Crowley didn’t give him the time to express his worry, he pressed their mouths together. 

It wasn’t a fantasy, or a wayward daydream. It wasn’t an idea that couldn’t quite form itself completely in Aziraphale’s mind. No, this was the living-breathing-present reality. This was Crowley’s tongue sliding into his mouth and Crowley’s arm coiling around his shoulders. His long-thin body pressed up against him everywhere they could manage it without losing their balance. 

It was like falling right back into the moment they’d shared the night before, as if they had never left it. Aziraphale’s jacket disappeared, his buttons undid themselves, and he was pushing forward as Crowley stepped back so they were up against his front doors in the middle of the day just like they’d been last night. His palms were dragging up and down the front of Crowley’s body, catching on the stretch of his shirt, feeling for the warmth of his skin just beneath. 

“We’re making too much of this,” Crowley gasped when Aziraphale kissed his neck. His voice was a hiss at the end, a low and appreciative sound. His hands were busy as they pushed Aziraphale’s shirt back over his shoulders, and then slid forward across his skin. He was bones and skin, as lithe as the snake he’d once been and Aziraphale was—

Well he was not. He was soft, and he might have been embarrassed to be save for the sounds Crowley made when their bodies touched. Except for how firmly he pulled Aziraphale closer and how insistently he kissed him. They were awkward and new, both trying to be the first to touch the other with any familiarity. “I don’t have a bed,” Aziraphale said. 

“I can fix that,” Crowley assured him. He arched to get momentarily free but he didn’t miracle a bed from thin air; he pulled his shirt off over his head and dropped it to the floor along with the loose scarf. “I think it’s about time we had a look at what’s causing all this distress.” His hands were on Aziraphale’s waistband, the tips of his fingers sliding along the insides as his thumbs worked at the fastenings. 

“You’ve already seen,” Aziraphale said. Because he had, back at the start, when the idea of having a penis to start with was more distressing than what he could do with it. Now he was here, in this moment, with a hardening arousal narrowing his concerns to how quickly he could remove his pants and how he was meant to use it to resolve this feeling. This, this _need_ to rub himself against whatever was nearest by until—

“I meant your pants,” Crowley said. He pushed just slightly and Aziraphale’s pants fell, leaving him as naked down to the serviceable white underwear. They were more ridiculous at present, being pulled out of shape by his aroused penis, but Crowley’s cheeks were pink and his mouth was open in appreciative shock. “They look good to me, angel.”

Aziraphale snorted, his hand dropped down to Crowley’s crotch, to where his aroused penis was misshaping his pants. “I wonder why you think that,” he said. “Come on, let’s see yours.”

Crowley barely managed to look up from where he was so intently staring, his cheeks could hardly be more flushed, but his lips quirked up in his most amused smile. He was loose-limbed and lecherous, leaning forward to whisper: “I’m not wearing any,” in exactly the way Aziraphale had thought he might. It was better than a fantasy, infinitely more arousing than a daydream. It was reality that there was nothing but a bit of stretched and worn old denim between his palm and Crowley’s cock and—

And—

“I don’t know what to do,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley’s laugh was a startled sound, a cough and a sputter that grew into a real sound. There was no meanness in it, but it stung a little. His arms were wrapping around Aziraphale before he could pull away, and his voice was ragged and heavy as he said, “I don’t exactly know either, do I, angel?” He kissed Aziraphale again and this time it was fond, and slow, and reassuring. It was the sort of kiss that lovers shared—the sort that demanded nothing, the sort that needed no greater resolution. It was just as it was, peaceful and content. 

“You said something about a bed?” Aziraphale reminded.

“Oh,” Crowley snapped his fingers and the interior of the shop twisted, and stretched. All the stacks and shelves were suddenly farther apart than they’d been a moment before. There were drawn curtains covering the windows and soft light from a few lamps he wasn’t sure he’d had before. Most noticeably there was a bed with lovely looking covers, soft and plump and inviting. “We don’t have to do anything until you’re ready,” Crowley said.

But he was ready. “I enjoy kissing you.” And they had this bed. It would be a shame to let it go to waste. Aziraphale stepped out of his pants and shoes. His fingertips were tracing their way down Crowley’s body, straight from the dip at the center of his collarbone to the peculiar little dip in his belly like the humans had. Their bodies were made to match, but neither of them had been born (precisely) and therefore had no use for belly buttons. “I like your body,” he said.

Crowley’s hands were resting on his waist, his fingers dug in as he pulled Aziraphale forward, as they were pressed together at the hips, (and how delightful that felt). He was groaning against Aziraphale’s mouth, working around to saying something that sounded very much like: “I like yours too.”

“We could lay down together,” Aziraphale offered. 

It was just that crawling into the bed and finding a place that was comfortable, and watching Crowley wiggle out of his pants—seeing him as naked as he could be—well, that left Aziraphale caught between the urge to pull the demon beneath him and let all these new human instincts take over and a certain sort of shyness. A strangled uncertainness that this was the best thing they could do, that it would even work, that they could be the same after as they were right now. 

Arousal was fleeting, it was easily lost and easily satisfied, but six thousand years of accidental and purposeful and enjoyable meetings could be lost over a little bit of nonsense. Crowley was beautiful naked, and every bit as tempting as Aziraphale had tried to imagine. He was naked, and close enough to touch, and all Aziraphale could think was how he just needed—

Just—

Just a little more time.

“It’s alright, angel,” Crowley said when he was settled next to him and leaning up to grab the blankets. “We have all the time we need.” 

“I feel a bit foolish,” Aziraphale whispered.

Crowley wiggled his arm under Aziraphale’s shoulders, laying half on his back and half on his side so he could kiss the top of his head. They were touching all along the side, sharing warmth and closeness but the arousal was fading. The urgency was lost. It was only Crowley saying, “we could nap, I do enjoy a good nap.”

“I’ve never napped,” Aziraphale said, “is it difficult?”

“Not all, just close your eyes and be still, and it just kind of happens on its own.” He was already closing his eyes, relaxing in place as if they hadn’t been closer this last time than ever before. “And we’ll wake up together in the morning.”

“That sounds lovely,” Aziraphale whispered. He closed his eyes and wiggled until he was comfortable.


	4. Chapter 4

Aziraphale had very little experience with sleeping and therefore very little experience with waking up. He had no real expectations as to what it would be like to wake up next to someone he loved other than it might be quite like falling asleep with that same person but in reverse. He might have thought it would be a matter of slowly coming to awareness not so unlike how he had slowly lost focus the night before. He could have predicted that it would be warm because the covers were very generous and angels, being made of love and light, tended to be quite warm. Demons were notorious for their love of hell fire, but they were a cool to the touch sort of creature. 

It didn’t surprise him to find Crowley snuggled so securely against his body that it was difficult to discern which parts of their two bodies were not actually touching. There were arms around his chest and a face pressed up against his collarbone. There was cool breath against his neck and the whole length of a lithe body against his. Crowley was curved in an impossible manner, with his skinny legs tucked up against Aziraphale’s in a way that made them almost seem as he were trying to blend their bodies into one. 

And they hadn’t gotten dressed.

No, Aziraphale was in nothing but a pair of serviceable white underpants and Crowley was in nothing at all. Crowley wasn’t wearing a single stitch of clothing at all. Just before Aziraphale had come into full awareness of this notion his hands had been resting comfortably and carelessly against Crowley’s back. His thighs had been spread just a bit to allow for (not quite a breeze, considering the suffocating thickness of the blankets, but at very least) a bit of space for air to move about. He had been enjoying the exchange of his heat for Crowley’s coolness and he hadn’t thought about—

Well, he hadn’t thought about anything but how nice it was to be held.

There wasn’t a lot of holding when you were a celestial being masquerading as a perfectly normal human on this planet. It wasn’t for lack of interest because six thousand years or so among the humans had allowed for several appreciative glances in his direction. Once or twice he’d even had what one might call a friend. But humans were nosy, and brief, and a great deal like a mass of children screaming all the time to get exactly what they want. Even if he’d been inclined there was heaven to think off.

But here he was, being covered by Crowley like there was nobody left that was keeping an eye on them. As if there weren’t a small taskforce in heaven assigned to keeping tabs on him just in case he went off and decided to do something else fiercely rebellious. They wouldn’t watch him all the time, because it was a waste of resources but they would certainly check in and what a time for them to peek through the camera lens this would be.

Aziraphale did very much like the closeness between them now. He liked in almost every possible way. The weight and the contact and feel of Crowley’s skin. (Although he couldn’t have anticipated how much hair a demon who had once been a snake would have. That didn’t seem at all very likely. Snakes weren’t well known for being hairy. Scaly, perhaps, but not much in the way of body hair.) And the longer he thought of how intimately they were arranged, the harder it was to ignore the obvious. He could feel all of Crowley pressed up against him, he could feel his breath and his heartbeat and the curled knobs of his knuckles pushed up under Aziraphale’s back. He could feel the hair on his calves, and his thighs and he could feel—

“Shhh,” Crowley hissed, more than half-asleep, without moving more than his lips. The tips of his hair brushed against Aziraphale’s jaw and his cheek. There was a ripple through Crowley’s body, almost like a stretch but without so much movement. “I’m not awake yet, don’t spoil it.”

\--

Crowley was very good at falling asleep, but it was the waking he liked less. It took too long and not quite long enough (depending on your goal, and his goal when he slept was usually to stay sleeping until he’d had enough and being an immortal being meant it was hard to know when you’d slept enough so why not just keep on sleeping until someone gave you a reason not to?) This wasn’t the usual manner of waking up; he wasn’t _alone_ in the dark. (It wasn’t even dark.) No, he was warm and that was a difference that meant more than any other because Crowley wasn’t cold-blooded in the usual meaning of the world, but he was cold often enough to dislike anything that made him feel colder. Waking up alone had often left him feeling colder, and slow and not at all inclined to start moving.

Movement kept him warm, but it required immense effort to extract yourself from a chilly slumber when the promise of warmth was nothing more than the promise of future exercise.

No, this was _warm_. This feeling of being touched everywhere all at once and gently held in place by blankets and soft hands, this was like finding a nice heated rock and a reliable patch of sunlight to spend a lazy afternoon on. This was glorious, a sensation that he was in no hurry to ruin with any sort of awareness or motion. No, Crowley’s plans immediately following his ascent into full consciousness involved doing nothing at all but appreciating how lovely it felt to be in this moment.

But the warmth he was laying on was an angel, and the angel that was providing the warmth had woken up before him, and like the angel often did, he had started fretting. His comforting hands had moved, and his softly relaxed body had started to tense. He could feel the racing of Aziraphale’s heart because there was no space between them. And it must have been quite a thing to wake up for the first time in six thousand years of solitary, individual existence to find one’s self smothered by a demon. All the preparing in the universe couldn’t have prepared Aziraphale for the immense reality that he was experiencing.

Just, Crowley needed a little more time. So he whispered something very much like, don’t spoil it, and he waited just long enough to be sure that Aziraphale was willing to give it a try, long enough for the angel to relax a bit, and he went back to enjoying the moment.

There was a lot to enjoy. Besides the heat of an ethereal being, there was the simplicity of touch. Not a lot of touching when it came to demons, at very least not a lot of purposeful, pleasant touching. Hell was so crowded there was always an elbow jabbing you in the ribs. There were scuffles and fist fights and cramped quarters so tight that you were almost always sharing your space with some smelly individual that had never had a bath or a glimpse of earth’s surface. Those were unpleasant, uninvited touches. They left a demon feeling uneasy and in need of a scrub.

This though, this touch was as pleasant as imaginable. As if this body he’d been given had been specifically designed to lounge here, to curve around Aziraphale’s so perfectly. The angel’s hands were on his back again, higher than they’d been a moment ago, and laying so lightly there was no mistaking the nervousness of it.

There was also the smell to consider. Angels were a shitty lot, in most ways, and that included the smell of them. Crowley didn’t prefer brimstone but he couldn’t quite bring himself to find anything _good_ in the smell of holy creatures either. Heaven smelled like clean floors and antiseptic spray. It was a violently clean smell, and it lingered on the skins of angels overlaid with the slightest crisp smell of cold metal. But Aziraphale smelled like worldly things, like human cologne, tinged with the faintest whiff of sweets and—

“Are you smelling me?” the angel asked.

“Am I?” There was hardly any reason to keep pretending he wasn’t awake enough to open his eyes, but as long as they were closed and he was here, he could keep touching Aziraphale everywhere he wanted. He’d been given permission by the hands that were resting on his back to take all the time he needed, and he needed a little more time to—

To what?

To touch? Crowley had always thought touch was a better verb than a noun. Sure, he was touching Aziraphale from the neck to the knees. They were touching everywhere that two people could. But it was a stationary, inactive touch. Their bodies laying together constituted all the excitement of a noun. It was only a fact that they were touching, and that was a shame. Crowley thought that they could most certainly upgrade to a real verb. That’s what he told himself as his body took the start of a brilliant idea and made it a better reality.

It started with the slightest motion, his weight shifted back, taking the pressure from bonelessly laying on Aziraphale’s chest to his knees pressing in deeper on the mattress. That little shift made him move back, and he slid easily along. There were catches and pulls where they had managed a bit of sweat and those tacky little spots were exploding spots of sensation, and awareness. 

He leaned up again, tipping his head so he could open his eyes and look at Aziraphale. So, he could see him how nobody else ever had, with his hair tousled by pillows and his eyes half-closed, and how his eyes glittered in the lamp light. To see him as his cheeks turned pink and his fingernails tightened into the skin of Crowley’s back. They were realizing, together, how the manner of all this touching had changed.

Those last, lazy acknowledgements were being made all across Crowley’s body. He was acute aware of how his legs had spread across Aziraphale’s legs, and how nice it felt to feel the soft, plump spread of the angel’s thighs along the inside of his. He couldn’t deny that his body was enjoying it because his hips were rocking forward on their own accord, looking for a different sort of touch than the one they’d been sharing a moment ago.

And there was _nothing_ between them but a pair of serviceable white underpants. The thinnest of cotton and a stretched bit of elastic, and it didn’t matter because Crowley’s cock was sliding along Aziraphale’s belly, and it was all skin there. He could feel how it made the angel’s breath stutter; he could watch how the sensation made his eyes widen. When he did it again, the tip of his cock slid up against the dip of Aziraphale’s belly button, and Crowley was gritting his teeth because there such a great wealth of possibility, and things to feel, and ideas that overtook him.

It must have overtaken Aziraphale the same, because one moment Crowley was on his knees looking down and the next he was on his back looking up. The blanket that had been covering them from the prying eyes of so many books was flung backwards like a curled bit of paper caught on draft of hot air. Crowley’s head hit the pillows and Aziraphale’s body was covering his with a sense of entitlement, and ownership that would have made even a straight dead man shiver with a dirty thrill. 

There were fingers in his hair and Aziraphale was kissing him, wet and deep and utterly shameless. The insides of Crowley’s thighs were rubbed by the motion of the angel’s body, at how his hips were curved so he could grind his cotton-trapped cock against Crowley and it was _good_ but it could have been better. That must have been why Crowley’s hands were between them, pushing at the stupid underpants until—

“Oh,” Aziraphale gasped. He lifted off enough to stare down between them. His bright blond curls were a mess of knots and flattened bits. The tips of his ears were pink as flowers. “That’s a unique feeling, could be nice…”

Crowley pushed the underpants as far down as he could and when that amounted to almost no progress at all he spared a miracle to banish them entirely. They were totally naked, on a bed, in the bookshop, and Aziraphale was smiling at him.

“That wasn’t necessary,” he said with no admonishment.

“Felt necessary.” Crowley’s legs were long, and thin and perfectly capable of wrapping around Aziraphale to drag him back to finish what he’d started. It was easy, because there was no resistance in the angel at all. No, he came willingly, all smiles and pink-pink lips. His throat was full of rumbling appreciation and his mouth was stuttering breathy sounds of effort. Crowley rocked back against the insistent roll of Aziraphale’s hips, they were hardly doing more than rubbing their cocks on one another but—

It didn’t matter.

This rare moment, this unthinkable thing, that would have been impossible just a few weeks prior. It was enough to be _close_. It was enough to pull Aziraphale forward to kiss the gasps of effort and the shocked sounds of pleasure right out of his mouth. Crowley was getting hot, and hotter, and every motion demanded another. His knees were tightening against Aziraphale’s body, and there was a hand on Crowley’s ass. 

When he had the time to think of anything at all, Crowley wanted to make a note of the strangeness of human instincts. He wanted to know what sort of things were inherent to sexual creatures sharing the shape of people.

But right here, it didn’t matter that the bed was shivering from the unceasing to and fro of their bodies pushing together with frantic need. It didn’t matter how his hands were scrambling to find a handhold in this topsy-turvy world, at how they landed on Aziraphale’s back but they slid as low as they could manage. At how he was pulling for more and more, how he needed the closeness of the body rocking against his. He needed the delightful, throbbing friction rubbing along the length of his cock. He _needed_ it, and he’d only ever sort of thought about wanting it before.

But he _needed_ it now, he needed to know where this tightening, insistent, breath-stealing feeling was going to take him. “Oh,” he gasped, with his head tipped back and a quiver starting somewhere in his gut, expanding outward in a mess of twitching muscles readying themselves to find out what came next, “ _Aziraphale_.” 

Aziraphale shifted, he had one hand pressed to the mattress beneath them and one on Crowley’s ass (as if he let go, there might be some escape attempt) and the space between them allowed for a harder thrust, and that made them both groan. (Or it might have been moan, whichever indicated they approved.) “It seems,” the angel said (to himself mostly) as his weight shifted back and his gripping fingers finally let go of Crowley’s ass. The loss was sudden and regretful, but then those delightful fingers were wrapping around Crowley’s cock—and not just his, but both of theirs.

(Humans were such naughty little things, always thinking up new ways to feel as good as they could, as long as they could, as quickly as they could. A human definitely thought up this; probably without doing any thinking at all.)

It took only a few stuttering strokes of their cocks rubbing together before—

\--

“Oh God,” Aziraphale gasped. He meant that it was very nice, and that he enjoyed it very much, and it was a relief from the building-and-building-and-building wild passionate feeling that had been narrowing all his concerns down to the length of his own penis. But he also meant it as a slapped shock shout of surprise because—

“What the heaven is that?” Crowley squawked. (There was really no better word to describe the sound of one’s lover’s voice when it was tied up in orgasmic pleasure and a sudden terrible shock at the same time.) He had extracted himself from Aziraphale’s grip very quickly and was pressed up against the headboard with his legs spread so far open his heels were at the very edges of the mattress. There were divots in the bed where he was still pushing his feet in hoping to get even farther away. “Is that normal?”

They were both staring at the milky white dribble that had come out of Aziraphale’s penis and was now caught on his own hand, and Crowley’s stomach with just a few drops soaking into the bed itself. “Well,” Aziraphale gasped, he sat back on his knees and uncurled his fist to stare at it. “How should I know? Didn’t yours do it too?”

Crowley stared down between his spread legs as if he hadn’t ever considered such a possibility. “It never has before.”

“Before? You said you hadn’t done this before.” Sitting on one’s knees did get tiring after a while, even when one was kneeling on a very nice mattress. Aziraphale shifted so he was sitting properly with his legs crossed in front of him and his dirty hand up and away from anything it might sully.

“I haven’t,” Crowley said defensively. He relaxed out of his immediate retreat, legs still sprawled but without panic and leaned forward to inspect the drying substance on Aziraphale’s hand. “I don’t go in for the unimportant bits. There’s a lot of,” his fingers swirled in a way that indicated no clear idea of what he was about to say, “stringy, wet, internal bits that don’t seem that necessary.”

“Stringy?”

“Aw, lots of tubes and whatnot.” Crowley didn’t seem to care to explain the internal workings of human sexual organs (which was fine, as Aziraphale had no use for that information except to know where this substance had come from). He was much more fascinated by smearing the unwanted fluid along the back of Aziraphale’s hand. “It must be—what do the humans call it? Cum? I’ve never seen in its real life, doesn’t seem to be holy.”

“ _Holy_?” That was a ludicrous idea. “Why would it be holy? What reason would it be holy?”

“It came from you, didn’t it? Aren’t you an ethereal being? A holy principality? How should I whether you have holy ejaculate? What if you did? That would have been unfortunate. For me more than you. I suppose it wouldn’t bother you at all. Imagine what you could do with it,” and Crowley must have been imagining it, since he’d only stopped staring at Aziraphale’s hand to look at the drying gobs on his own belly. “Could make holy babies, what do you call them?”

“Nephilim?” Aziraphale offered. He could have pointed out that there had never been an actual Nephilim on earth. It was just something the humans had made up. Like werewolves and money.

“Right, Nephilim.” He had run out of steam, and sagged against the bed, one hand resting on his own leg and the other laying laxly across a pillow. His color had gone back to normal now that the shock had faded. His lips were curled into a soft smile and his eyes (that had gotten very round, and very yellow) were almost back to normal now. “That wasn’t bad, surprise,” he pointed loosely at Aziraphale’s crotch, “aside, I think that was very nice.”

“Messy,” Aziraphale agreed. “But no, not bad. I could certainly do it again. Although, I’m not really sure what exactly we did. It wasn’t—” How did he want to phrase ‘a pre-conceived notion that I developed based on listening to humans mumble things as they came and went throughout the centuries’, or ‘what I was expecting based off the naughty novels I’ve read and the ratty porn magazine I found stuffed into the couch once’? “What I thought it would be, but it was very nice, it just didn’t—I guess I didn’t account for, well, I’ve never been really clear on how two penises are meant to—that is to say that it’s not necessary for their to be,” he stuttered for a second, felt his cheeks brighten and reminded himself that he was far too old to be blushing, “penetration, just that I thought it was a vital part of the whole,” he struggled for a word, “thing.”

Crowley shrugged, “I don’t think it matters as much as the humans make it seem like it should.” That was a relief. It certainly made him feel better about almost spoiling the whole thing. 

“Ah, good.” Aziraphale scooted across the bed to sit next to Crowley. They were shoulder to shoulder, with their legs stretched out in front of them. They were as naked as possible, not really doing anything but sharing a small space. There was an old clock ticking away seconds and minutes. Outside he could hear the growing commotion of the day (and if he had to guess he would say it was after lunch time, but he couldn’t be sure what day it was in relation to the last time he opened the shop. Same day? Next day? Day after?) 

“I know how they do it,” Crowley said after a pause that seemed to indicate they had abandoned the conversation. “If you want to know.”

“Oh, maybe later.”

Crowley nodded, and slouched, and pulled the blankets up with his toes. He had them up to his knees before he turned to stare at Aziraphale like something had only just occurred to him. He said, “Petronius,” as if that meant something worthwhile and after a pause just scoffed. “You never cease to amaze me, angel. Never. Not once in six thousand years have you failed to surprise me.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No,” Crowley kissed him very softly, and very sweetly, not at all how they had kissed one another just a bit ago. He smiled when he leaned back again, “now, we should get lunch, I think.”

“Lunch sounds very nice,” Aziraphale said. He was feeling confident, and just a bit devilish. (As devilish as an unfallen angel could feel.) He waved his hand and did away with all the circumstances that separated them from leaving. The bed was gone, and their clothes were back, and Crowley’s sunglasses were in his hands just waiting for him to put them on. “I know a little sandwich shop that you’d just love. If you ate anything, but it has a lovely atmosphere that I think you would find very pleasing and the food is divine. It’s close enough we could walk.”

Crowley was running a hand down his shirt, like he was making certain that it was fully correct and then he motioned toward the door. “Lead the way, angel.” He waited until they were to the door before he slid his glasses on.

Out on the street there was a man with a satchel and an impatient sort of look saying, “is the shop open?”

“No, I’m sorry, I have some business to attend to.”

“Will it ever be open again?” the man asked. “It’s been closed for a week!” (That answered exactly how long they had napped for.)

Crowley slid his glasses down his nose and looked at the impatient man from over the top of them. He didn’t transform into any sort of creature and he didn’t seem to expend very much evil energy at all. All the same his stare seem to unsettle the man, and then to cause him some distress, and finally as Crowley pushed his glasses up again, the man ducked his head and left without another word. “Only a week,” he said, “that’s the shortest nap I’ve ever had.”

“What did you do to him?”

“Nothing,” Crowley assured him. His fingers were cool, and long, and perfectly welcome when they threaded through Aziraphale’s. “Lead me to your moody sandwich shop. I need somewhere to lurk, I haven’t lurked in ages.”

“Can you lurk while you’re sitting?” Aziraphale asked, “I thought lurking was sort of a standing up activity.”

“Oh, if you’re good at it, you can lurk anywhere while you’re doing anything. I’m very good at lurking, I taught a class. Lurking 101 it was called, I won an award.” They walked as they talked, and Aziraphale didn’t bother to point out how silly it seemed to win a award for standing still in the dark looking shady. He let Crowley talk out his nerves and he interjected when he thought it was needed to keep the conversation going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this little fic has been a joy to write. this feels like the end of something here, but I havent done everything I intended. Maybe a sequel will be forthcoming.


End file.
